


sailing to drift

by distira



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-07
Updated: 2010-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 21:25:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distira/pseuds/distira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>coming out!fic, or, the difference between "this" and "you"</p>
            </blockquote>





	sailing to drift

Sergio is a creature of habit. He wakes up at the eight thirty every weekday to go for a run before training, and at noon each weekend, in time to get lunch before heading out for a match. He is always _almost_ late, just toeing the line, slipping into elevators right before the doors ding shut. Iker tells him that he's too young to be so set in his ways, that he should wait at least until he hits thirty before becoming so predictable.

But in his life of transfer drama and constant speculation- will this season be it? Is this match the deciding match? Is today the day to pick up a debilitating injury, or is today the day to lift a trophy? -Sergio likes his routines. He likes going home every third weekend, home to Camas, not home to his apartment in Madrid, and spending time with his mother, his father, his brother and sister. He likes his morning jogs and taking Odie for fifteen minute walks every evening. He likes his post-game rituals, with a cold bottle of beer and shitty crime shows on the TV. They center him. He tells Iker that he needs his habits and his routines, otherwise he might end up in clubs until six a.m. every morning, and Iker just stares at him, but he lets it go.

It's funny, because Sergio has never been a player known for his consistency, but that's how it is.

Life, Sergio knows, is funny sometimes.

Fernando is an upset to Sergio's routines, Fernando who always arrives early and leaves late. Sergio doesn't mind, not really; he's perfectly happy to wake up a half an hour early if it means he gets Fernando's tongue in his mouth and hand in his pants before his jog.

It doesn't bother Sergio that sometimes, Fernando comes over after matches and turns the TV on mute and climbs onto his lap. Not being able to watch CSI, Sergio thinks, is a fair price to pay for Fernando mouthing at his collarbones and flicking his tongue over the roof of his mouth and tightening around him when Sergio grips his hips to drive in deeper, always deeper.

"I love you," Sergio gasps one Sunday, bone tired from a grueling match, the derby against Atleti, against _Fernando_ , buried in Fernando's body, the striker fucking himself on Sergio's cock while Sergio grips his hips and tries to hang on.

"I love this," Fernando grunts and then he comes, white splatters over Sergio's belly.

Later, after they've cleaned up and Fernando's kissed him goodbye (quickly, and away from the windows), Sergio lies back against the pillows and wishes there wasn't a difference.

\---

The winter break comes, and Sergio goes to Sevilla while Fernando stays in Madrid. Sergio is happy to have his routines back, uninterrupted and just as calming as they ever were. He pretends he doesn't miss Fernando knocking on the door right as he's settling in for the night, or calling him before matches to try and rile him up, distract him from the task at hand.

And the winter break goes, so Sergio leaves his parents' house and his mother's cooking and his infallible routines and habits and goes back to Madrid in the second week of January.

"You okay?" He and Fernando are at a café and it's a Tuesday. They both start practice again tomorrow. Fernando reaches out and puts his hand over Sergio's, stroking the defender's knuckles. "You're quiet today."

"Just missing home," Sergio says. Fernando nods, and when they get up, moves forward to hug Sergio for a few beats too long, longer than usual, and his lips brush across Sergio's cheekbone, ending in a small kiss to the corner of his mouth.

Sergio squeezes Fernando's hand as they separate and smiles, and Fernando laces their fingers together for all of a minute before breaking away, glancing over his shoulder for photographers.

\---

Of course, they get caught.

There is a joint meeting the next Wednesday. Valdano and René and Fernando's agent Margarita and Marin, the director of Atletico, sit on one side of a large table at one of the Bernabéu offices, and Sergio and Fernando sit on the other side. There are three pictures laid out between them, pictures of intertwined fingers and Fernando's lips touching Sergio's. He feels the ghost of that almost-kiss at the corner of his mouth and his hands twitch with the need to touch his lips.

"The Clubs will support you, should you choose to let things proceed as they are," Valdano says. Sergio is fixated on the whorls in the wood of the table and the words are coming in and out, in and out. "This will have no bearing on your positions with the teams."

Sergio looks up and searches out René's eyes. They are a mixture of confusion and anger and support and love, and Sergio doesn't care what happens with these pictures, he doesn't, as long as he can still play and as long as his family still loves him. "It won't be easy, if this gets out," René says quietly. Marin nods in agreement. "The Clubs will support you and your positions, but none of us can speak for the reactions of the fans or of other players."

"But," Margarita cuts in, "if you want us to make this go away-" she waves her hand at the pictures as if she could make them disappear with a snap of her fingers "-we can do that, too."

Out of the corner of his eye, Sergio sees Fernando nod and breathe a sigh of relief. He closes his eyes for a long moment and listens to the blood rushing past his ears. A heart breaking, he muses, is a curious thing, because nothing can physically break. Instead, he is overtaken by an impossible ache that pushes against his ribcage and beats at his temples and when he opens his eyes, René is standing up to usher him out the door.

Sergio breaks his routine and goes home with René, home to his mother's kitchen and his sister's pop music. He eats copious quantities of soup and his mother's homemade bread and sleeps for the better part of two days. Sitting on the landing of the stairs, he can hear René telling his parents, in hushed voices, what had happened. He hears René's surprise to learn that his parents had already known about Fernando. "Sergio didn't want to tell you because you are his agent," his mother says. "I'm his brother too," René replies, and Sergio retreats to his room, guilt pooling in his stomach.

On Friday afternoon, Sergio's mother comes upstairs and makes him pack his bag and kisses his forehead and tells him everything will be alright, but that he is a grown man and needs to go back to his job and his life. Sergio gets on a plane and feels lost when he lands at Barajas, as if he's never been to Madrid before.

He pays a fine for missing two days of training and then he goes to his apartment and puts all of Fernando's stuff -a toothbrush, a few t-shirts, an extra set of training clothes, a package of store-bought tortas, and an Atleti shirt that he'd swapped Sergio for, among other things- into a box.

There are five messages waiting for him on his phone. Two are from Iker, the first asking if he's okay, the second more worried, demanding to know where he is. One is from the club management, notifying him of his fine. One is from Valdano, saying that everything had been taken care of. The last is from Fernando.

 _"Hey, Sese. So, uh. Where'd you go, hombre? I thought things would just be normal now, you know? Anyway, call me when you get back, or don't, I guess. It's whatever. Bye."_

Sergio calls him back when he knows Fernando's at training. "It's not whatever," he snaps into the receiver. "And things were never normal and you fucking know it. And it's not my fault so don't turn this around on me." He bites his lip until part of it peels. "You wanted to make the whole thing go away, so you can get what you want, man. The whole thing? It's done."

He makes René deliver the box to Fernando's house, with strict instructions not to actually talk to the striker. He doesn't really care if his brother complies.

And at the weekend, Sergio watches the Atleti match on TV, accompanied by a six-pack, and it feels like poking a fresh bruise.

Bruises yellow over time, but Sergio isn't sure if this one will fade.

\---

The phone rings too early, the clock reads 10:04, on a Friday morning in February. Sergio fumbles for it and opens and closes his mouth a few times without making any sound before he answers. "'Lo?"

"Aren't you usually awake by now?" It's Iker.

Sergio still has his routines, but they've shifted now. He stays up later and sleeps until the last possible moment. He's still always _almost_ late, but now his reaction time is slower, and he's missed more than one elevator.

"Yeah, I guess," he says finally. "Felt like sleeping in."

"You've felt like that a lot lately."

Sergio grunts and hangs up.

Raúl calls him later that day. "Fix it before the World Cup," he says.

"What are you talking about?"

"Whatever's wrong. Fix it before the World Cup."

"Oh," Sergio says. Raúl has two settings: human being and captain. There's no doubt in Sergio's mind that he's in full captain mode right now. "Okay."

\---

There's a friendly the first week of March. Fernando and Sergio both get called up.

It's easy enough for Sergio to avoid the striker- he has enough teammates from Real Madrid with him that he always has someone to run with, and he and Iker are rooming together, so ostensibly, the only time he has to see Fernando is at practice and at the match. Sergio establishes a routine as soon as they arrive; he goes to sleep at eleven thirty and wakes up at eight. He eats with Iker and runs with Salgado and hangs out with Mori after practice. He goes with Pepe after curfew to steal bread and he eats it in the bathroom so Iker won't see.

Fernando, being Fernando, comes to steal food with Pepe one night. Sergio mumbles excuses about having to get back because of Iker, and Pepe frowns but doesn't say anything. Sergio doesn't say anything to Iker when he returns, but he gets in to bed early and wakes up late for breakfast and Iker casts appraising glances at him all through practice the next day.

And because Iker knows Sergio better than Sergio likes to admit, he gives Fernando his key card and swaps rooms the night after the match.

Sergio is tired even though he only played during the second half, and he wants to go to bed early because they have a 7 A.M. flight the next morning. But when Fernando walks in and stands in the doorway awkwardly for a minute, the only thing Sergio can hear is Raúl's command ringing in his ears, _fix it_ , so it seems kind of inevitable that Fernando ends up sprawled on top of him, shoving a leg between his thighs and grinding down. Sergio doesn't do anything to resist, just slips his tongue into Fernando's mouth and tugs hard at his Mohawk.

They settle into a new routine after that, as if they're just falling into place. A big part of Sergio hates it, because he remembers that day in January when Fernando decided he didn't want this or them anymore (and really, Sergio doesn't even properly know what happened that day, he just remembers how the ache felt like it was going to take control of his body), but a bigger part knows that it's pointless to try and avoid it, because clearly that hadn't worked out so well the first time.

So they go back to flirting and drinking and Fernando drops by after match days and they fall asleep with their legs tangled in Sergio's sheets.

"Missed this," Fernando mumbles sleepily against Sergio's collarbone on a Sunday night in May.

Sergio rolls over and bites back the _i missed you, idiot, not this_ that rises in his throat.

He fucks Fernando hard that night, gripping his hips tightly enough to leave bruises, and he calls Fernando a slut when the older boy comes. It's the only thing he can think to do, the _missed this_ at the front of his mind, and he feels bad about it afterwards, but Fernando doesn't say anything right away, so Sergio figures it's okay.

\---

Of course, it's not. He wakes up the next morning -Monday, he has to get his run in before practice, so he hauls himself out of bed and goes to get a glass of water before he puts his trainers on- to find Fernando standing at his kitchen counter, drinking a cup of coffee and looking angry.

"Don't talk to me like that, okay?"

Sergio gets a glass out of the cupboard. "Like what?"

"I'm not your slut," Fernando tells him. Sergio puts the glass down. "I'm not here for you to use me, what the fuck."

Sergio remembers how the blood had pounded past his ears in that boardroom in January. The sound he's hearing right now is remarkably like that. "Really?" He asks. "Because that's all it ever seemed like we were."

"That's bullshit and you know it."

"It's not," Sergio says. "You're the one who wanted to hide away and pretend like it didn't exist, so fuck you."

The words hang between them, heavy, like a bomb, and Sergio's heartbeat is the _tickticktick_. Fernando puts his mug down and plants his hands on his hips. "One time. One time five months ago. I freaked out, big fucking deal."

"Yeah, actually, it is."

"Why? Why was that one time such a big deal? Did you want to be all over Marca and El País and every other newspaper in Spain?" Fernando's eyebrows are raised in genuine surprise.

"I don't know if I wanted all that," Sergio says, "but I would've rather had that than have you run away."

"I didn't run away. I called you. _You_ ran away. You got fined, you think I don't know that?"

"You called me to say that things would be normal," Sergio says flatly. "But we weren't ever normal because we weren't ever together."

"What are you talking about? Of course we were together."

"We were your dirty little secret."

"Because that's our life," Fernando snaps. "We're footballers. We have fancy cars and pretty girlfriends. That's how it is."

"But that's not what I want," Sergio says.

"Well, it's not gonna change anytime soon, so you're gonna have to deal with that," Fernando tells him.

"It's not gonna change if everyone acts like you," Sergio points out. "Maybe if someone actually _did something_ , it wouldn't be like this."

Fernando presses his lips together. "So what, you want to do a presser and tell everyone? You want to call Marca and do an interview? I'll do it, Sergio, if that's what you want, but do you realize what that would mean? For our teams?"

"What do you mean, if that's what I want? Since when do you care about what I want?"

"Since always," Fernando says, pronouncing his words slowly, as if Sergio's a child. "Why do you think I've been _doing_ this?"

Sergio snorts. "You don't love me."

It's not what he meant to say, but now that it's out there, he can't remember what he had been going to say. He clenches his jaw shut but he can't take it back, and part of him is relieved, because it's been weighing on him for so long now, but part of him wants to just walk out the front door and pretend he never said it, because saying it out loud makes it so much more real.

"Why do you think that?"

"You never said it," Sergio replies. _I love this_ , he hears in his head.

"I didn't think I needed to."

"I said it."

"Sergio, you say it to everyone. You say it to Iker and Odie and the fans who ask you to sign their shirts at the end of matches."

"Yeah, well, I meant it when I said it to you," Sergio says.

"You really need to hear it?"

"Yes."

"I love you."

\---

The next day, they're called back into the same boardroom. Valdano, René, Margarita, and Marin are lined up across from them once again, and Sergio shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Fernando stretches out languidly next to him. Margarita pulls a photograph out of her briefcase and sets it on the table.

"So what's the problem?" Fernando asks after studying the photo for a minute.

"It's a picture of you leaving Sergio's house," Margarita says. "At eight in the morning, wearing your club-issued suit from the previous matchday. It's not the most incriminating photo we've seen-" she wrinkles her nose "-but it will raise some concerns."

Before Fernando can reply, Valdano cuts in. "As we said in our previous meeting, both Clubs will stand behind you if you choose to let this become known."

The photo shows up in a gossip rag the next day, a Wednesday. Sergio doesn't bother to read the captions.

\---

 **Press Conference, Real Madrid CF. May 26, 2006.**

 **Pictures of Atletico Madrid striker Fernando Torres leaving your residence have led to popular speculation that the two of you are romantically involved. How do you respond to this?**

 _Sergio Ramos:_ I respond by saying that yes, this is true. We have been together for almost one year now.

 **Why have you chosen now to publicly come out?**

 _SR:_ What happened was that the pictures you mentioned before got to the press. I don't know how. To be honest I don't really care. But what happened was that we didn't want to lie, so we decided to tell the truth, instead.

 **Do you foresee this affecting your on-pitch relationship, both with your respective club teams and with the national team?**

 _SR:_ It has not mattered so far, no? We are both professionals and will continue to do our jobs as professionals. Personal relationships have no place on the pitch. In Madrid we are still rivals, in the national team, we are still teammates. It will stay that way.

 **The response from both of your respective club teams has been that they support you as players. What kind of a response are you expecting from your fans? What reactions have you witnessed from your teammates?**

 _SR:_ Honestly, from the fans, I have no idea. My hope is that the fans will continue to be fans of the clubs, because both of us are still first and foremost footballers. Football is still what is most important. Of course there will be some people who are unhappy with my personal choices. I can't stop that from happening. But the important thing is that the club is backing us and I think that what we do on the pitch says more than anything else. That is what matters.

My teammates have been largely supportive. The bottom line is that I'm still the same footballer, and they have been respectful of that. Of course there is some teasing. But that is always in the locker rooms, I think. Maybe there is a little more teasing now but it is not malicious. Most of it is about being with someone from Atletico, who of course are our rival club. Nobody has threatened me or said anything cruel to me. We are teammates, just like before.

\---

 **El País website, May 27, 2006.  
 _FOOTBALL RIVALS REVEAL PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP_**

 _Madrid, Spain_

 _This week, Sergio Ramos and Fernando Torres, players of Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid, respectively, have announced that they have been romantically involved for one year now. This news was brought to head by pictures that leaked in Spanish tabloids and has been confirmed by both players in question and their respective clubs._

 _"It got to the point that we weren't comfortable sneaking around," Torres said in an interview yesterday. "Of course there will be some negative reaction, but we are both confident that the level at which we perform on the pitch will overcome that reaction."_

 _Both players insisted in their press conferences that their on-pitch relationship will not change. "Of course I'll still try to score against him," Torres, a prolific striker, said regarding Ramos's role as a defender._

 _The response from fans has been mostly positive, despite many initial assumptions to the contrary. Both clubs and players have received letters of support from fans. However clubs and players have also received their share of hate mail._

 _Homosexuality in football has long been a controversial topic. "We knew there would be those who are upset by the course of action," Marin, the general director of Atletico Madrid, said. Negative responses have come in the past, most notably with the tragic case of Justin Fashanu, a Premier League footballer who took his own life in 1998 after coming out publicly. "But we will deal with this in the best way possible and do everything within our power to protect our player."_

 _"Real Madrid is fully in support of Mr Ramos's decision," said Jorge Valdano, general director of the club. "We have talked everything through with both players and we are all on the same page. This news will not affect his standing within the club. His playing time will continue to be decided by the coaching staff based on his performance alone." The Atletico Madrid management has issued a similar statement._

 _Gay marriage has been legal in Spain since 2005, although both players insist that they are far from thinking about tying the knot. The next derby between the two teams will take place in September._

\---


End file.
